“Shall I tell you what the problem is? You will be surprised at how simply it may be expressed.”
“Okay. Tell me.”
“My name. You have not asked me and I have not offered. In your head you still think of me simply as the Asset, do you not?”
“Yes,” I confess.
“Ordinarily you would have asked how you should call me-but in my case a name like Jack or John, or even something exotic like Ermenegildo or Bartholomew, wouldn’t do it, would it?” He giggles.
“No.”
“And you think the reason is I am not like others, I’m too different, too weird to deserve or be capable of carrying an ordinary human name-correct?”
If he had used a different tone I might have been afraid of some kind of paranoid outbreak, but he is relaxed, in control, and even slightly humorous in his manner. The waiter brings two tiny langoustine cups as amuse-bouches. We devour them in one swallow and call for more grissini.
“Shall I tell you my real name-at least insofar as any name can be said to be real? Let’s put it another way-would you like to know who I am, really?”
I realize I must answer each of his questions with total honesty. “I’m not sure,” I say.
He grins. “Excellent. Yes, you are quite right. And the reason you are not sure?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because the answer is quite daunting. I know you sense it, though, for you are very intuitive, like me. I’ll give you a clue. It is fortunate that you are a Buddhist. Someone of a more Western persuasion might have a nervous breakdown. So, can you guess?”
“No.”
“Tut-tut. I think you can. But you are too polite. Or afraid of being laughed at. You must not be. I won’t have you anything but frank and open-so much do I love you, my brother.”
“I’m lost. Okay, tell me.”
“I am Jesus Christ, of course.” The grissini sticks in my throat, I cough. “Oh, I don’t mean in some ridiculous way of the mentally ill. I can see that thought just flitted across your mind. No, I mean as a matter of pure cultural logic, that is what I am: the Second Coming. Think about it. Two thousand years of unmitigated lies, nauseating superstition, mental and physical torture, genocide, corruption culminating in two world wars which were Christian wars-and nothing but war and exploitation ever since-in the end the West must produce the living image of its own twisted path. Me. I am the alpha and the omega, but more importantly I am the Thing Itself.” He smiles. “After all, one does need an identity of some kind-at least for the moment. Oh, you must not think of me as that poor jerk on a cross. That was, shall we say, the give-them-a-chance phase. No, if anything I’m more the guy in the middle on the back wall of the Sistine Chapel. Why shouldn’t I kill and send to hell those who have failed me so badly?”
There is indignation in the stiffening of his spine and the flash of his eyes. I decide to plunge into the asparagus crepes, which are really very good, before taking the matter further.
“That’s why you said Rome was your hometown?”
“I said one of them. I do go there a lot. I have a frequent visitor’s pass for the Sistine Chapel. Jerusalem is still hard for me, and as for Bethlehem-have you been there?”
“No.”
“I can assure you that these days it’s not at all the kind of place where you’d expect to find three wise men and a virgin.” He gives a great chesty guffaw.
I stare, openmouthed. What kind of monster is this?
“Actually, it always was a squalid little dump.” He laughs some more. “Is this difficult for you? But as a Buddhist you are aware of the basic truth of rebirth, are you not?”
I hesitate. “Yes.”
“So, you know that in this body one finds only a segment of the whole person, who is, by the way, androgynous. To find the whole being you must add in all the previous lifetimes. Well, someone has to be Jesus, don’t they?”
“I suppose.”
“And don’t tell me you are not aware that my message two thousand years ago was basically Buddhist with a few politically correct references to the Old Testament to keep the Pharisees off my back?”
I cannot eat anymore, appetite cannot survive such conversation. I give up and put down my knife and fork.
“It’s quite true that I did ten years in a Buddhist monastery in Kashmir two thousand years ago.” He frowns. “I had a wonderful time, but all the while there was this awful sense of doom, you know, because I had to go back and get myself crucified. Put rather a dampener on the experience.” He smiles. “But not to worry, it’s all over now. Revenge is mine, I will repay.” He pauses to look me full in the face. “And you will help me.”
The confession that he is God has relaxed him the way a good confession relaxes some perps. It is as if we have exchanged vows of loyalty and now he can speak freely. I decide to try to obtain an admission to the crime of murder by God. I do not have any recording equipment, it would be only my word against his, I would probably not get a conviction, but it would bring some kind of closure.
“Naturally, as Christ you rely entirely on the Father.”
“Naturally.”
“You would not kill without his…direction?”
“He feeds me, like any father. I owe him everything.”
If only he wasn’t sane, there would be no threat to my worldview. I take three folded pieces of paper from my jacket pocket and smooth them out in front of him. One is a fish-eye view of a murder scene in which a young woman has been beheaded. The second concentrates on her head, which has been wrenched from her shoulders. The third is a shot of a mirror on which someone has written in blood, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is.
Up to this point I had no idea what my next move would be. I had to know how he assimilated his past actions. How does God deal with his own bad behavior? Will he wrench my head from my shoulders? I am using crude but well-tried tactics here. Now that I have confronted him with hard evidence that a savage killer lives in that splendid body of his along with Jesus Christ, will he explode? Collapse in remorse? Find some theological way around it? But this is a totally new breed of human and he doesn’t do any of those things. His training takes over. He turns the pictures around under his hand, examining them curiously.
“This happened where? Why wasn’t I told? Okay, you won’t tell me because I did it. Let us form a plan. We’ll try to catch me together. Let us work it out. You were assigned to the case, so it has to be District 8. The killer-me-has a connection with you, therefore any repeat crime will happen in District 8. That’s got to be where I strike next, and I will strike again, because my purpose is to obtain and retain your attention. Why?” He frowns. “Because of the way I was conceived, brought up, enhanced, and trained-I am a killer freak from B movies, a kind of Frankenstein, in desperate need of normal human love and kindness, of a family. I desperately want and need to impress you because in my mind you are all I’ve got, being of close kin. In reality I don’t have anyone at all, I’m deceiving myself that you are in the least interested in me as a brother. All you want is to solve the case, make the streets safe again for young girls, lock me up for life. I am this pathetic fellow so riven by madness he dares not acknowledge the total contradiction between two halves of himself. As in classic psychosis, the one half of the personality is hermetically sealed off from the other. What it all points to is that I not only will kill again soon, but it will be in this same market-the one behind your police station, is it not?”
He pauses to look at me. “That’s the obvious reading, anyway. Have I got it right?” He doesn’t wait for an answer but frowns deeply as if he is consulting himself on where he plans to strike next. “A little too obvious, perhaps-you are not entirely convinced, although I’m sure your colleagues would fall for it. But, yes, it will have to be the market again-if I’m so smart, strong, and powerful, I would naturally want to taunt you in the most provocative way.” He looks up at me for a moment, says, “Don’t worry, we’ll catch me,” smiles cheerfully, then returns to the documents I gave him.